ORLANDO, Fla. - He has one of the most famous voices in showbiz - a low, whispered growl played for menace or for laughs. He is a gifted impersonator, having taken down everyone from Richard Nixon to 30 Rock co-star Tracy Morgan with his killer impressions.

ORLANDO, Fla. — He has one of the most famous voices in showbiz — a low, whispered growl played for menace or for laughs.

He is a gifted impersonator, having taken down everyone from Richard Nixon to 30 Rock co-star Tracy Morgan with his killer impressions.

Yet he is rarely asked to be “just a voice” in a movie or TV show.

So, when DreamWorks asked him to work on the animated holiday comedy Rise of the Guardians, Alec Baldwin knew he wouldn’t play it straight.

“Jeffrey Katzenberg called and said he wanted me to play this — how can I put this in politically correct terms? — a complicated, competitive Santa Claus,” the actor recalled.

Baldwin’s guardian character, North, is macho. Katzenberg and others had suggested a version of Santa that hailed from the Siberian wilderness.

After all, when Jerry Seinfeld was casting people to pick up in vintage cars for comic riffs in his new web series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, the veteran comic called on Baldwin straight away.

“I’ve imitated a comic for a while,” Baldwin countered. “But that’s about it.

“Jerry, like (30 Rock creator and star) Tina Fey and most of the people on 30 Rock and all of the people on Saturday Night Live, writes his own material. The ‘comic’ label for me implies people who write funny things that they then perform. I don’t write. I’m lucky enough to perform funny lines that other people gave me.”

The two-time Emmy and three-time Golden Globe winner (for his turn as a smooth, understated and cunning, yet politically and comically tone-deaf executive Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock) was singled out by the New York Times Magazine as one of “Eight Actors Who Turn Television into Art.”

Those days are soon to end, though: Despite Baldwin’s efforts to keep the show on the air (he said he offered to cut his salary), 30 Rock is in its final season.

“Now that it’s over, and it’s going to end, I’ve come around to ‘That’s a good thing,’?” he said. “I am excited and nervous about going back to the sort of career I used to have — dramatic parts, some comic parts.

“And the fact that I really don’t know where I’m going to be six months from now — that’s what life was like before 30 Rock.”

The former narrator of television’s Thomas the Tank Engine said he enjoys working on animated films.

Films such as Rise of the Guardians, he said, might be the best way for an actor working today to guarantee his immortality.

“Kids’ movies go in five-year generations. You’ve got the Little Mermaid generation, the Pocahontas generation, kids who came up on Shrek and then kids who were the first to see Madagascar. A couple of years go by, and there’s a whole new crop of kids that comes along, and they’re going to see these movies not in theaters but at home on DVD.

“Every good movie like this has a chance to access generation after generation of kids. There’s nothing else in film that can make that claim.”

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.